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You might think so, but Saskatchewan was the first province in Canada to have universal health care, and in the US I think that Alaska's healthcare system is closest to a universal medicare or single payer system.

Well, whichever it is, it will be the state that loses the most medical professionals in the first year. Thomas Sowell makes a great point about government's attempts to regulate transactions in order to lessen the impact of them on one side. Eventually, the side that is not favored cannot continue to make the transactions at a loss, so the number of transactions drops. The most obvious example is rent control, which reduces housing stocks, but it works the same way with any other commodity or service, and make no mistake about it, medical care is as bound by supply and demand as anything else.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

Get off the cross. Just about everyone works, most for a lot longer than 26 years and they don't get the kind of benefits you have. So they made the wrong choice according to you , which means that they should have all worked for the government. Well, there is a name for a country where the most or the best jobs are in the government.

Yeah, you're for smaller government, aren't you?

Yes, we are. And part of the reason for that is that we are part of the government, and understand its workings, but also because, unlike most of the government employees out there, our functions are unique. We're always pointing out that government enterprises fail because once they have suppressed competition in the private sector, they have no incentive to improve. Their revenues are guaranteed and there is no mechanism that punishes failure. Firing a bureaucrat or politician whose errors caused massive failures is harder than trying to thread a needle with a tank round. However, there is one area where competition does produce excellence in government, because it is the one area where nations compete, and that is the military. The incentives that we deal with are victory and defeat, our market mechanisms, our prices, as it were, are literally life or death. This is why the military functions more efficiently than the rest of government, because our lives depend on our getting it right.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

My complaint isn't about the benefits the military get. As I have said before, my family has done well by the military and government. My complaint is about hypocrites like Peanut who don't see the whole picture, and their place in it.

What makes you think that you see more of the whole picture than any of us? What qualifies you, or by proxy, a politician, to override my medical decisions? What expertise do any of the lawyers, academics, politicians and bureaucrats that drafted Obamacare have to determine how I should prioritize my health care spending, or my family's?

Originally Posted by Novaheart

If we have a falling out then so be it, but I think that you are objective enough to see that without the farm workers, cashiers, minwage factory workers, and other "not real men (according to Peanut)", then there really wouldn't be a tremendous need or budget for folks on government paychecks and benefits be it federal, military, or the public schools.

It's not about them not being real men, it's about the pact that we make with them. We put our lives and bodies on the line to protect them, incur damage from intensely physically demanding training that keeps us prepared to do what we do, and in return, the taxpayer agrees to take care of the damage that we inflict on ourselves. And if we didn't do that, if we didn't physically put ourselves between you and the rest of the word, there wouldn't be farm workers, cashiers, minwage factory workers or anything else here, just slaves to the crown, the fuhrer or whatever they called the next incarnation of the dear leader. If anyone of those other workers wants to do my job, there's a recruiting station within walking distance anywhere in America.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

Moreover, as I have said before, we are already paying for the most expensive kind of healthcare for the poor, self employed, and others who don't have comprehensive care or resources. What we are excluding them from is the preventative care that Peanut enjoys and refuses to accept that he does not pay for. He thinks that pittance he pays every month is the equivalent of a premium, it isn't. It's a program fee or a premium share in a self insured system. What kind of a fool his age thinks that a monthly health program fee of $57 -$197 is the cost of his healthcare?

Nobody is excluded from health care. People without insurance, like all other people, make choices, and one of the choices is what they are going to spend their money on. Why, for example, are people who get food stamps, who have the means to purchase healthy foods, going out for fast food? Why are we subsidizing obesity? Because some people would rather eat something unhealthy but tasty and convenient, rather than take the time to cook for themselves or eath things that don't appeal to them. We can throw the entire budget into anti-hunger programs (in fact, we have, several times over), without changing American eating habits, and it's the same for medical care. When I was self employed, I chose to do without health insurance for a few years, risking an illness against the much more urgent costs around me. Eventually, I was able to afford both, but it took a while, and until then, I did without. However, if somebody had fined me and said, "we are forcing you to spend money on what we think you need, rather than what you think you need," I'd have told them where they could stick their mandate, because it would have meant not having a computer, or a car, or making my rent.

Single-payer is a euphemism for government deciding what our priorities ought to be, instead of leaving that up to us. It's tyranny, albeit the soft kind, but it is invariably followed by more of it, until eventually, it's all that there is, and that's another reason why the military members here oppose it. We've fought tyrants. We don't want to succumb to what we have fought against.

12. If a Republican only dislikes blacks who they disagree with politically,

like Barack Obama and Eric Holder, but likes blacks that they agree with, like Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleeza Rice, can that Republican really be considered to be a "white supremacist"?
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Response to Nye Bevan (Reply #12)
Wed Feb 8, 2012, 11:54 PM

MrScorpio

14. Yes...

Because, you can NAME practically everyone that they do like and everyone that they don't like makes up the remainder of black people.

Mr. Scorpio, how have you managed to live so long being so stupid? Someone is really looking out for you.